Caltrops - Reviews

Forum Overview :: Reviews

by Worm 05/06/2007, 9:08pm PDT

In preparation for the upcoming expansion I am getting hyped up about NWN2 again and working on an Arcane Archer. To keep myself stoked and successfully working on my game before the expansion is released, I've started a write-up on NWN2.

A little about the author: I’ve played through Baldurs Gate more times than I can count. Let’s try anyway. Once as a Necromancer, my first time and I had to cheat at the end of it. This was mainly because of the hyping of Necromancy in UO and related in-game events. After I figured out that was a shitty class I replayed as a Halfling thief. Once the expansion came out, I started with my old Halfling thief. After that I started again from the beginning as god knows what. When Baldurs Gate 2 came out, I started as a Dwarf Beserker and played it all the way through. When the BG2 expansion came out I started a Gnome Cleric back at the start of BG1 and played through to the end of the expansion. I also did a Paladin game after that just to do the Vicona romance. This kind of shit elates me. I’ve spent, no; I’ve wasted lots of time in D&D adventure games and dungeon crawl games. Just try to keep all that in mind when you read this review.

This game features enough D&D to make your liver go bad. There are loads of races and sub-races, prestige classes, and implementation of every skill. Even as a bard you’ll be given chances to use your perform skill in normal conversation, sometimes it’s even a real roll. You can turn around lots of situations with diplomacy and other skills. Don’t worry that the game is lacking dialog if you don’t want to play a master diplomat, you get banter from your NPCs on almost anything you do, and this creates the most annoying aspect of the game, the influence system.

[Influence: Failure]
All the things you say will either be agreed or disagreed with by your current party layout. This will effect their influence rating with you, all it really alters is if they give in to your incessant prodding about their past, and it effects what I believe is the single NPC class change in the entire game.

The system is far more intrusive than what prevented me from getting all the info out of HK-47. While the dialog in KOTOR required a few points there are some things in NWN2 that don’t seem to be unlocked until upwards of 30 influence. I used a console command to cheat, and I suggest you all do the same. You don’t even get something interesting from a lack of influence, just tight lipped NPCs.

[Crafting: Failure]
The game also features a nice try at player crafting. The crafting simply serves to make +6 items of the +2 and +4 ones you’ll find in your adventures and the enchanting amounts to adding plus five and loads of elemental damage to whatever you please. The whole time you’ll have to hunt down various monster parts to grind up into essences. This wouldn’t be so bad if greater essences could be split into multiple lesser essences. Instead of that you can downgrade a high essence to a lower level, not break it down into multiple lower level ones.

On top of that you’ll have to hunt down gems, which are plentiful enough as loot and in shops. However, it’d be better to just have the store and the crafting tables next to one another, just in case you thought you had a canary diamond on one of your characters. The end-game weaponry is really disappointing as it just consists of rehashes of old weapons with higher enchantments. All this item hunting and there is really no chest or way to access out of party NPC’s items. So you end up with various mules and the crafting materials dispersed sloppily amongst your characters.

If you can’t stop yourself from needing a +6 Acidic Flaming Darksteel Sword of Icy Chaotic Bane, be prepared to be frustrated out of your fucking gourd.

The normal difficulty is called “Hardcore \m/ D&D Ruleset”
The game attempts to take off the frustrating edge associated with some DnD computer games, with the starting difficulty featuring fireballs that won’t harm your teammates. Independent of difficulty level, none of your NPCs really die, they just are rendered unconscious and wake up after hostilities have ceased, and the game plays with that in mind. With your meager four man team, you’ll constantly run into more enemies than you ever did in BG2. This can get pretty frustrating, especially when you go from a warehouse to fight with half the thieves in Neverwinter to a mansion with the other half hidden in the shadows lying in wait. This seems to have been slightly addressed with the latest patch.

Who’s your daddy?
Naturally, the game starts out with you as a foster child the catch-all for whatever absurd combination you want to play. The tutorial is a sufficiently gay festival where you compete in four competitions, beating, casting, stealing, and shooting. You’re awarded a ‘Harvest Cup’ for playing through the entire thing, which you can immediately pawn off. You find yourself fleeing your once idyllic home with no understanding of why people want to kill you!

Along the way you accumulate NPC friends and battle the forces of evil, even if you’re evil. You follow a pretty set path and there are few side quests on the way. The game attempts to provide you with a Brady Bunch of NPCs who represent the full gambit of what you could possibly want rather than allowing you to choose. You really don’t get many doubles of any class, which means depending on what class you are you’ll have a pretty regular party layout and often have little reason to bring along the bard or druid.

The NPCs can all be set into Puppet Mode which will allow you to directly control them. This is necessary for any caster you have given AOE spells to, unless of course you set the difficulty to make your party members invulnerable to that. Most NPCs have their own little side stories, some which amount to a few dungeon crawls or world map encounters, a couple have actual impact. They are all also locked into whatever classes you got them as, which is a dumb choice given the expansive prestige class system and fun leveling.

The combat is very well done and suffers due to the horrid dungeon crawls you’re forced to endure. When you have a quest to go into a house it’s designed like a dungeon, this is the same for everything you’ll encounter in the game. Even trying to stop a truant from fucking goth guys in a crypt. As you’re stopped while you’re walking around you assume it will be a short side quest, however it turns out that the particular crypt stretches the length of Neverwinter. Most dungeons are littered with traps that spring infinity times and don’t get revealed until you’re right on them. You can get a feat that makes your guys normal speed in search mode, but unless you put it on your main character there is no assurance you’ll need whomever you have it placed on. Since elves get that ability default, it’s worth playing one because even with no skill he’ll still reveal most traps.

Chapters
The first chapter plays with you as a ghetto ass punk, and somewhere after that you find yourself living large in a Keep. There are some neat things you can pick in customizing your keep, which really don’t seem to pan out successfully. At a point you need to defend the keep from a pretty giant invasion force. The game manages to be very awesome at points, only if you have the thick skin required to get through some of the more horrible parts.

Lots of problems!
The customization is pretty sweet, and allows for enough variety in facial design to keep you happy. All the armor looks pretty good; however, some limited customization would be nice. The races are faithful to the D&D Monster Manual, which causes some pretty idiotic cut scenes if you pick a Halfling. My first character was a Half-Elf bard that turned into a Duelist, and he looked exactly like the kind of slime I wanted him to be. He played sort of like a fragile critical hit machine, which was pretty neat.

Your build and what prestige class you pick are really important. I didn’t think my duelist through, and constantly got my ass handed to me. There are some worthwhile FAQs to read, and some really important feats (Practiced Spellcaster) that can get lost in the shuffle.

Some of the end encounters are incredibly tough, especially if you went with a cool character build that’s not too ready to handle every situation. I ended up cheating on the final boss, but they had a very cool idea for the final fight, which would have been wonderful if they scaled his hitpoints back by a few thousand. I used god mode. My major problem was that the battle uses ALL your characters, and therefore it was made harder. However, if you did not properly manage the obnoxious influence system, some characters would turn on you. How that will translate into the expansion is yet to be seen.

The biggest thing to look forward to is hopefully some better modules will be released. I spend more time farting around trying to figure out a cool character than I do actually playing as one of them.